I feel like I’ve been hearing a lot about Snarky Puppy lately. So much so that I assumed they were a new band. Wrong:

Snarky Puppy has been a force for a while now, earning the ears of millions for more than a decade. The band started as college friends in the jazz program at the University of North Texas back in 2003. But the formative era came a few years later, after Michael League [bassist and bandleader] became a part of the gospel scene in Dallas and eventually brought the jazz students to church, where music plays a different role than it does in the classroom. In the pulpit, it’s a channel for spiritual healing, a communal experience between players and congregation. As an experiment, League pulled his jazz friends and his gospel bandmates into one ensemble, where the two groups bonded together and established ground-zero for building the sonic identity of Snarky Puppy

I also had an idea that (because the name sounds similar to Skinny Puppy) that they might be a, what, young bratty dark punk band? Wrong again.

Their secret sauce? A long-simmered recipe of jazz, funk and gospel. Thirteen albums later, you can still hear these gospel and jazz orbits crashing into each other.

Oh, and one more thing. They only play instrumentals.

They’re a band whose lyric-less melodies are still yelled (sung back) to them at their concerts around the world, as a shared catharsis for everyone in the room.

I really couldn’t have gotten that more wrong.

The band plays two songs in this lengthy set.

The first is called “Tarova.” It opens with a wonderful sequence of keyboards. Shaun Martin plays the keyboards with that talk box thing (made famous by Peter Frampton). He seems to be having a kind of call and response solo with Bobby Sparks. Sparks has the most fascinating thing on his keyboard. A very large whammy bar/lever that he is able to push really far down to bend notes far more than any keyboard I’ve ever heard. It was so much fun watching him do this, I was very glad he was up front.

During all of this, “JT” Thomas is keeping time on drums. The song proper jumps in with a fun funky riff with lots of trumpets. Everybody gets to do something impressive in this song and there’s a bunch of solos as well.

I really like the middle funky section that’s mostly bass and keys.

The song builds to a moment when everyone stops–after a two second pause which makes everyone clap, they resume with a great percussion solo from Nate Werth.

When the song ends, League introduces everyone and says who soloed. He jokes, “That’s what you;re supposed to do in jazz, right, say who soloed n case anyone was confused that there were solos going on.”

Then he addresses the crowd. He says that most people there are employees and family and an abundance of interns. He wants to turn the cameras around for a minute (only one or two turn around) and force you into a musical rhythmic experiment. Turns out that

Seconds before we hit record, Snarky Puppy’s bandleader, Michael League leaned in to ask if he could “do a little crowd work.” I suspect he waited until the last second on purpose, but it’s been easy to trust this band when they have an idea, judging by the three Grammy Awards they get to dust off at home after every tour run.

What resulted was a Tiny Desk first: League divided the audience into two sections, one side clapping out a 3/4 beat and the other half a 4/4 beat, creating a polyrhythm that I’m sure a handful of coworkers didn’t feel so confident trying to pull off. But this band pulls you in with simple instruction and a little faith.

League says, “we’re going to a polyrhythm because things have to get nerdy and unenjoyable.” The crowd does admirably well with the two rhythms going on. They are aided by Nate Werth on percussion who is really amazing (not necessarily here, but in the two songs). I believe that they are creating 7/4.

The audience is warned that this polyrhythm will be used in the second song “Xavi,” dedicated to their friends in Morocco.

The song opens a funky bass and a lovely flute melody from Chris Bullock. Then after a short guitar lick by Chris McQueen the whole band jumps in with a really funky melody. The riff is taken over by two trumpets Justin Stanton (whose trumpet has a mute) and Jay Jennings (no mute) and Chris Bullock who is now on sax.

I was going to say you really don’t hear much of the violin in this set as it gets kind of melded with everything else. Then mid way through the song, Zach Brock takes a wild and, often, effects-riddled solo in the middle of the song. It might be my favorite part of a set that has many highlights.

The clapping part is used twice. In the first one, the band is kind of quiet and the clapping is aided with great percussion from Werth and another lovely flute.

The guitar and bass in this song are fantastic even if they are never entirely prominent. There’s also a very cool keyboard solo from trumpeter Justin Stanton.

Then the clapping comes around a second time. During this one, there’s a guitar and keyboard making all kinds of sounds while the drums keep hitting everything, there;s more percussion and a little more flute.

The whole set is tremendous fun. Totally not what I was expecting and so much better.

[READ: August 15, 2019] The Idiot

I grabbed this book because I had written down the author’s name as someone I wanted to read. I also got a kick out of the title (and the obvious allusion to Dostoevsky).

I started the book and enjoyed it and then realized that I had read an excerpt from this story already. And that is why I had written the author’s name down.

This book was written as a kind of response to her first book. In an essay in The Guardian, she explained that:

In her first book, The Possessed, New Yorker journalist Elif Batuman complained that as an incipient novelist she was always being told to eschew books and focus on life. Literature since Don Quixote had been seen as false and sterile; disconnected from lived experience. After years as a graduate student of Russian literature, she decided to challenge this by writing an account of her own haphazard attempt to live with and through books.

Of the excerpt I wrote quite a lot (and quite a lot that almost gets left behind after the excerpt): (more…)